Review:
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, December 2013: How big is Big Data? As it turns out, unfathomably large. According to Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, the authors of Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, "If you wrote out the information contained in one megabyte by hand, the resulting line of 1s and 0s would be more than five times as tall as Mount Everest." A megabyte, though, is about one-fifth of an mp3. Written out, one terabyte, a common size for personal external hard drives, "would extend to Saturn and back twenty-five times." Still, Aiden and Michel understand how to look at data sets from a humanist perspective. They created the Google Ngram Viewer, the revolutionary tool that allows anyone to search for the frequency of words over man's written history (at least within the 30 million books Google has digitized since 2004). In Uncharted, they explore the history and implications of Big Data--its influence on business, government, and our personal lives. But perhaps the most remarkable part of Aiden and Michel's work is how they are able to turn the abstract language of Big Data into an accessible and thoughtful book. Who knew millions of lines of data could be so much fun? --Kevin Nguyen
About the Author:
Erez Aiden received his Ph.D. from Harvard and MIT in 2010. After several years at Harvard's Society of Fellows and at Google as visiting faculty, he became Assistant Professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University, where he directs the Center for Genome Architecture. In 2009, he was named one of MIT Technology Review’s TR35, the world's top thirty-five innovators under age thirty-five. In 2012, he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers - the highest honor given by the U.S. government to young scientists - for inventing, with colleagues, a technology that probes how genomes fold in 3-D. He lives in Houston with his wife and family.
Jean-Baptiste Michel is a French and Mauritian entrepreneur and scientist. He is the founder of the data science company Quantified Labs, an associate scientist at Harvard University, and former visiting faculty at Google. He is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2010. In 2012, he was named a TED Fellow and one of Forbes’s “30 Under 30.” He lives in Brooklyn with his wife.
For the last decade, JB and Erez have been using big data to study human culture. Their work has appeared as cover stories of Nature, Science and the New York Times, and their talks have been viewed over a million times at TED.com.
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